Disability Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-23
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Emer Higgins (FG), Dublin Mid-West

The Government acknowledges the essential role voluntary organisations have in delivering a range of disability services. The Department has provided substantial additional funding to HSE specialist disability services since the transfer of functions in 2023. In this year's budget, €3.9 billion is provided for. In budget 2025, it amounted to €3.2 billion, so there was quite a substantial increase of almost 20% in that one year alone. These substantial additional investments demonstrate the Government’s commitment to supporting disability services, along with the provision of significant year-on-year Supplementary Estimates.
Through the annual budgetary process, the Department has helped the disability sector to meet the increased costs associated with existing service provision while also incrementally expanding service provision to meet demand. Every year, the Estimates process allows the HSE to request funding for the full cost of service provision, including cost increases experienced during that year.
In this year's budget, the Department provided €3.9 billion for HSE specialist disability services. As I said, that was a substantial increase of €628 million, or almost 20% above 2025, the largest ever increase in funding for disability services. It also follows significant year-on-year funding increases in recent years. In fact, there has been an overall increase of €1.85 billion, or 91%, since 2020. The additional funding sought for this year includes a significant uplift to the existing level of service provision of €478 million to address sectoral funding pressures such as the increased cost of service provision, pay cost pressures, capacity limitations and service provider sustainability. In addition to that €478 million for the uplift to the existing level of provision, a sum of €150 million has been provided to fund service expansion in residential and respite services, day service provision, home support, personal assistance and children’s services. The Department is also providing €43 million in disability capital funding for this year, a significant increase of €16 million on last year's provision.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-23/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-23